


Experiments in Resonance

by ArdeaWrites



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Gen, and is kind of a fanboy of certain dead composers, because guy needed a moment, happy Freeman, he has great conversations with dead people, he isn't always an unfeeling cyborg of a human, it's the same Freeman as Physics of the Crowbar, pre resonance cascade, this is shameless nonsense about Freeman attending a) a club and b) a classical music concert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:13:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25195213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdeaWrites/pseuds/ArdeaWrites
Summary: Freeman attends a club and a concert. Both feature noise but to an inhibited physicist with a perfect ear, they are vastly different experiences.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26





	Experiments in Resonance

Sound, rough tuneless sound, clawed at him. He inched back through the throng of people until his fingers felt a table edge at his hip. He gripped it, feeling its rhythmic vibration. This wasn’t music, it was a demand. It was hands on his shoulders shaking him, yelling in his face.

He hated it.

The lights were insufficient, the air fogged with particulate matter. What lights there were-cold LEDs and weak red lasers-moved erratically overhead, so he couldn’t predict when one would shine straight into his eyes. There was nowhere safe to look except down at the floor, at his feet, if he wanted to avoid the sudden bite of an LED.

He suppressed his desire to cough. It was impolite, it’d show discomfort, others would know he wasn’t at ease. He moved back further, around the table’s edge, through a maze of chairs until he found the wall. He didn’t know where the doors were or how they’d all come in. His group, the lab cohort of a dozen fellow grad students blowing off steam and cash, was somewhere in the middle of the crowd. They’d abandoned all self-consciousness. Said it was the one place a couple science nerds like them could act like idiots without being mocked.

He could see why. Everyone in the place was an idiot, dignity left at the coat check. A handful of socially inept lab rats attracted no notice.

But he couldn’t follow them. Not with the music demanding control, or the press of bodies or the choke of chemical odors and fog powder. In the lab, strong scent meant something was wrong. A fume hood left open, a vial releasing vapor, a bottle of solvent left unlidded. Here, everyone wanted to be smelled, and they’d all chosen something volatile.

This wasn’t fun. He wanted out. He inched along the wall and around a corner, past the busy bar serving drinks in unsanitary glassware. Past the booths and cocktail tables with their twos and threes, all yelling over the noise. The only way to hold a conversation would be sign language but no one was using it. Gestures and broad movements yes, and the kind of subtle facial language meant for attracting mates, but reasonable, intelligent conversation was not happening.

He risked a glance up. Red EXIT lights called from the hallway near a restroom door, but there was a line blocking his path. He caught a queue-occupant’s eye and signaled “out.” She moved aside for him and he shoved the door open.

Cold air. Wet night drizzle, yellow streetlights reflecting off damp pavement. Cars, the odd distant siren. He smelled cigarette smoke and other inhalants and drifted away from the smokers’ corner. He didn’t have the cover of a cigarette or vape device to justify leaving the club but he didn’t care. He could still feel the vibration in his chest, like the after-image of a bright light, echoing its demands for his attention and surrender.

He hated the assumption he would give up control to the sound. He felt what they all felt, the pull that dragged them to the floor and made them willing to move against one another, trading autonomy for loss of inhibition. Specific rhythmic sounds mimicked the effects of certain chemical stimulants. Humans craved release like that in whatever form it came. Could get as drunk on sound as on alcohol, as on intimacy.

But not him. He liked having his mind to himself, his thoughts and attention free of external influences and demands.

The night air was refreshing, the city noise easier to block out, the drifting smoke from the little huddle on the corner diluted by the rain. He wouldn’t go back in.

\---

He’d paid an absurd amount for the ticket. He’d been keeping an eye on the violinist for two years. Waiting for them to come through his part of the country playing the piece he wanted to hear, on a concert tour with a specific focus on authenticity of sound and performance.

He had limited options in venue. Very few were built correctly for stringed and wind instruments anymore. The prices were higher too, with less seats to offer. When the concert tour was booked, he’d done the calculations on his preferred venue to find the optimal seat and he’d shelled out whatever they’d asked.

Not a small number.

The orchestra played instruments invented and perfected in the sixteenth century, performing a piece written at the dawn of the nineteenth century, in a venue built in the twentieth century. Six hundred years of human invention bent towards the perfection of resonant harmonics. This was sound he could hold, could sense and follow with the conscious intellect as well as the unconscious ear.

And it wasn’t just the sound, it was the knowing how the sound was influenced by string material, tuning, species and age of the wood, by the horsehair and rosin, metal and reed, by the placement on stage, even by the humidity and temperature inside the concert hall. And how it was brought to life through human hands. No two performances would ever be the same.

He found his seat. There were people all around, packed in close, but they were quiet. Minding their own business. Safely ignorable, except for the one man who wore too much cologne but he was seated some distance away. They were an invisible backdrop, dressed in dark and unobtrusive clothing, silent and respectful. The seats were narrow, old and uncomfortable, but it came with the tradeoff of perfect acoustics. He could bear a hard upright back with minimal padding for the near two hours he’d be sitting in it.

The scrawl of tuning. The breath of silence, the introduction to conductor and concertmaster. The polite quiet clapping. And the precipice before sound.

He heard and he watched, two different sets of data. The physicist held the music at arm’s length, dissecting angle of bow, air forced through aperture, vibration through steel, but the man under the physicist _listened._

The music drew him in. He felt it, an invitation to follow it through the mind of the composer. A man had written with ink on paper. A laboratory notebook, a formula within the scoresheet. Knowing the sound produced by each kind of instrument, its limitations and range, the harmony, and the edge into dissonance of a key change, a tempo shift between movements.

The melody and harmony traded between instrument and section. A hand-off one note long and the music went elsewhere, coiling through the orchestra before returning to the concertmaster’s violin. The violin carried it solo as all other instruments stilled. Every note pure, no dry scratch of horsehair or bleat of breath; the bow drawing a chord across two, three strings, fingertips defining wavelength, a shift of flesh and a shift of sound. Resonance was movement. It required energy input, intentionality and control. An instrument at rest played nothing at all.

It had him. He rode it through, let the physicist rest in the sure knowledge that the resonance was _correct._ Perfection was the physicist’s chief pleasure but the mortal man, the wet body and the sensory organs it contained, found joy in the artistry of sound. Found permission to feel.

And he felt, not himself only but someone else’s feelings, the frustration, the edge of darkness on which the composer walked, the narrow cold room where a man facing silence took resonance between his hands and wrung from it beautiful data.

The work of a man who spoke his same language, who knew the castles built of mathematical perfection would endure long past the flesh, would transcend the failings of the flesh. Who left behind something wondrous, but to feel it required the impossible marriage of steel and dead wood, animal tissue and human intent. The laboratory setup a stage, the experimental procedure read out by the conductor’s hands, each portion performed as directed. The ephemeral music itself the product, weighed and measured for purity against two hundred years of theory and performance.

He found it satisfactory. The deep kind of satisfactory that made him sit outside the concert hall on the cold marble bench, as the audience streamed out in their ones and twos, and think with relief about nothing at all. He’d felt that music through his core in a subtle way. No clawing, clanging mess of sound dragging him out of his skin by force, no. This had been a conversation with a fellow intellect. A performance just for him. Certainly everyone else had heard the same notes, but it was not just the notes; it was the _knowing_. The impossibility of steel, cellulose, polymer and pine sap, organic detritus and dead things, producing such perfection; guided by one who owned silence as deeply as Freeman, and for whom, he liked to think, silence was release from the useless, dissonant clamor nonintellectual life.

His own work was not beautiful to the senses but maybe, by the end of his tenure in the depths of the laboratory, it would be beautiful to the mind. In two hundred years, would someone read his notes on crystal resonance and find a shared harmony?

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this performance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cokCgWPRZPg which is somewhat low-hanging fruit for this but it's also gorgeous and a good recording despite being live and almost three decades old. For optimal experience of having your brain hijacked by music I would recommend playing from a CD and with noise-canceling headphones.
> 
> Also forgive me my musical nomenclature mistakes, I have played but not seriously in about two decades and I was better at making sound than remembering what things were called.


End file.
